Darn Those Witches

In my life, I think everything does happen for a reason. I might not think that moment to moment, but when I look at the bigger picture it makes the most sense to me. Bad things happen to teach me lessons, and good things happen because of lessons learned; that's the way I see it. My choices may play some part in what happens, but I do think there is a bigger picture, even if there might be different ways to get to it.

Shakespeare might not agree with that in how he depicts fate in Macbeth. 

In Macbeth, the three witches tell Macbeth a prophecy that he will be king, but they don't ever tell him how, why, or what he has to do, they just know the end goal. Macbeth then decides that to make this come true he must kill Duncan, which he follows through with. The second part of the prophecy states that Banquo's son will become king. Macbeth, trying to stop this from happening, kills Banquo by hiring two murders to do it (and then a third one randomly shows up). The witches then tell Macbeth that he should fear Macduff, so Macbeth kills his family. And lastly, *spoiler alert* (but not really because everyone dies at the end of one of Shakespeare's tragedies) Macbeth dies at the end of the play, so the prophecy should come true. Macbeth was king, but now Banquo's son should be king. 

But, is all this really fate? Let's all take a second to look at the three witches. First off, they tell Macbeth that he will be king, which gives him the idea of killing Duncan to make the prophecy come true. Secondly, they tell him that Banquo's son will be king, which gives him the idea of hiring murders to kill him. When this happens, a third murder shows up that the others didn't know about. It could have been one of the witches making sure that everything went as planned. Lastly, the witches make him suspicious of Macduff, which leads to him killing his family. All of these things lead to Macbeth's downfall and ultimately make the prophecy come true, like the witches intended.

So this all boils down to one thing; it wasn't fate, it was the witches convincing Macbeth to do all this crazy stuff. Macbeth is already this easily influenced person with an incredibly guilty conscience, so it was all to easy for the witches to influence him and in turn make him go crazy. Poor Macbeth, he got taken advantage of by three crazy witches with a devious master plan. 

So... In the wise words of a meme stolen from Mrs. Genesky...